I’m hanging out after school with my junior high algebra teacher. It’s a vaguely flirting conversation we have.

I’m working on an test question, an essay question. The page is labeled 10/10 for page 10 of 10. I take the whole hour of our time to work on the essay.

Now the regular class fills in; the classroom is my high school physics classroom, though the subject is humanities.

Students fill in the class. They are completely at ease. They all took the test at home: not just page 10, but pages 1 through 9.

I beg to do the entire test; my classmates laugh.

I receive pages 1 through 9. There are multiple choice questions with unfamiliar diagrams. The essay was tough going; this is even worse: I can’t wrestle down these multiple choice questions.

The teacher leaves momentarily and the students, without fear and in casual progress, exchange tests, improving each others answers.

A girl at the back of the room is so bored she has a relaxed spontaneous orgasm.

In an attempt to concentrate better, I move up to the front of the class on the right-hand side, but it’s no use. Frustrated, I stand up and approach the teachers desk. In an honest confession I quit the test and turn it in.

After this dream, two other dreams follow with the same tension and then quiting of a test or trial; I forget the dramatic contents.

I walk into my professor’s large office. My professor is my therapist, but not in body for she is older and with small frame. We sit at a large cherry desk, discussing a paper of mine. The paper is all marked up. There are lines through many a sentence; its pock-marked with comments. The paper is due more work.

I talk about the paper: I’m nervous; I feel there much to redeem in it. I go over some of the points. Something about how even Goethe did some soldiering in youth.

Abruptly, she says, “I want to talk about your thesis: heritage.”

I’m stunned, first at being cut off from my earnest discussion, then from the word heritage, for I don’t take it’s import. The thesis she mentions refers not to the current paper, but to a paper for the class finale.

She expounds on heritage: “Patterns passed down generation after generation, until the pattern is broken.”

I look around; there are two young students — lovers — waiting for their turn with the professor.

PS: A day or two later, in happenstance, decided to listen to The Way of All Flesh, whose main thesis was on the inheritance of disposition.

I’m in a bar. Sublime is singing, belting out songs. He is an Italian opera singer, looks like Inigo Montoya.

He is dejected. He says he has nothing left.

“I bet you have something left” I say.

I walk home, as if walking home after school in the comfort of fall. My therapist is just across the road walking in the same direction. I realize I’m bumping into her because I hung around at the bar and delayed my regular departure time.

It starts to snow; it’s a happy snow.

I start to float, laughing.

I go higher and higher. At first it was a fun thrill of levitation; now, I speed up and move through the air with speed, whisked through the air by unseen angels.

I land softly on the large branch of a tree and fall onto the street of a quiet suburb.

I have a iPad like device; I try to run a maps app; the screen flicks, revealing that it’s a Microsoft offering. I see in some vision or video a way to remote into another computer and use maps in a machine within a machine, but my dislike for the original operating system is too great and I throw out my device entirely.

Into the opening we burst
onto solar fairy tears
evaporating over the entire field
In silence, I gathered
how innumerable these
continual launchings
Still day, yet sunset
a deer appeared; we chased after it
Only to return
The path had provided inklings
good-omening twinklings
I hadn’t expected this
Breathed it in
Longed for it before I left
the dogs whimpered, unaware
I exhaled as they tugged me past
hoping it fore, knowing it aft
Post-script
Again amid tears and deer
I wonder
dumb-struck
How easily I might be
unwitting participant
in an ever-ascending, light-shedding
conspiracy

Drowsy in the afternoon
I daydream of how life began
Where to begin?
A fool to set the dial at dawn
full daylight then
fifteen minutes beforehand
affords no preview
A full hour buys an inkling
of twilight’s twinkling
of Daphne’s whispering
embracing of the embankments
away from Apollo’s attainment
Even then,
I have yet to see when
day articulates its begin
A solitary cloud on the horizon gleams
the night is brushed into luxuriance by degrees
the tension of the starry–eyed watchmen
and their moonbeams are relieved
The horizon is wreathed in ambient light
out of the blue
the firmament is established
an ocean of clouds, rose–imbued
engulf their first little plume
from the ash of the trees’ leaves
a remote rebel wind blows
rekindling an ember which died long ago
a reversal of fate crackles
the wood births its master
Beyond the mists, a beam strikes
Behold the glob: uncontrolled fire
My eyes catch her eyelash rays
heat alights me; I avert my gaze
knowing dawn
I lumber home to begin my way
occasionally glaring back
resenting the triumphant orb’s
overpowering glory and iridescent morning
What could I do to compare with the making of the day?
I just bask in it
All those unanswered sunsets
each have their sad goodbyes’ bright condolences
I’ve slumbered in ignorance, abjured the witness of it
I don’t live here, but somewhere hours hence or thence
and remain lulling in jet lag, a perpetual guest
Now in my seeking
I send unsuspecting foxes leaping
How natural it fits
the pace of my body and the strengthening of my wits
with dawn’s rising, when I attend to it
How ready I am
at the day’s sad forsaking
to yield to the dream
of continual awakening